I'd been saving this book for the perfect moment, and I picked it up now after realising that this moment had descended on me months ago. I've been trI'd been saving this book for the perfect moment, and I picked it up now after realising that this moment had descended on me months ago. I've been trying to map my own loneliness in a new city, I've been trying to accept it, to not be ashamed by it. I've been working from my room, and have stopped going to the office. My loneliness is ironic, it wants to fester and grow. It has made me turn my room into precipice, I look at myself sitting at the desk, staring at the laptop while my fingers punch the keys. I look so solitary, so lonely in the dimmed down lights. I needed someone to guide me through this, and Laing couldn't have done a better job.
In tracing out solitude, confinement, loneliness and the intersections between them through art, Laing has created a shrine of the lonely. So I read this book, considered it sacred, offered prayers, asked for relief (from loneliness of course) and left silently. I sought refugee from myself at this shrine. This book answered my prayers, sometimes hissing, sometimes soothing. Because that's the thing about loneliness, it isn't elegant at all. You can't be graceful about it. But you can face it with dignity, as Laing did, though she was naturally afraid of failing all along.
I should have eaten this book more delicately, instead I devoured it in a hungry gorge. So my loneliness not only resonated with it, but responded too. Reading this book is like running in a stranger's garden after not having seen a single flower for years. It's a very beautiful and overwhelming garden. ...more
I am done with difficult questions and difficult answers and difficult conversations. I want to have easy, laidback conversations like the characters I am done with difficult questions and difficult answers and difficult conversations. I want to have easy, laidback conversations like the characters in this book do, even when they're talking about difficult things.
Reading this book was like watching a block of wood swaying along the waves on the ocean. Sometimes the waters turned turbulent, but the wood bobbed along, always pacified, without sinking.
Ari and Dante tethered each other so that when one drifted apart, the other pulled. They tethered me too. I was always drawn to the book even when I put it down for breaks.
Sometimes when you watch the sea, you want to dive deep down, to its horrifying darkness. But then the sunlight slants and hits your eyes and, you slowly but surely, return back to reality and are content enough with just watching the current. That feeling of contentment is this book....more
In my late teens and early twenties, I suffered from crippling insomnia. All my waking hours were spent zoomed in on just one thought: sleep. My overwIn my late teens and early twenties, I suffered from crippling insomnia. All my waking hours were spent zoomed in on just one thought: sleep. My overwhelmed brain couldn’t make sense of anything back then, couldn’t form many coherent thoughts. Sleep was an aphrodisiac. I was certain that a precious few hours of non-existence would fix everything. My life was like a stream-of-consciousness book, it was one thing after another merging together, without any structure or continuity. I longed for the ellipsis, the breaks. When I was finally put on meds for my problem and learned how to sleep again, I discovered something that made all my experiences with insomnia seem even more meaningless than I had presumed them to be - sleep only reinforced the reality of my waking hours, and made it more concrete. As though I was supposed to face everything with a new vigor (that I couldn’t muster) because I’d had my rest, my escape.
So, when the protagonist of this book just decided to sleep for a year hoping to construct a new self upon waking up, I could relate to her. Except, I also knew that the self that emerges out of sleep need not necessarily be a new one. It often isn’t. We try and try and try to understand our waking hours, and yet they elude our grasp. This closed circuit of sleeping and waking up day after day after day is tiring, and of course, we would all like to sleep away a year. Or two. Not everybody dares to do it though. I don’t. The protagonist lived my dream life in this sense. But her life after the break, after the hibernation, didn’t seem to be very different. However, when she finally woke up, she saw that the world itself was fractured and she could feel one with it.
Sleep seems like a fantasy, but so does life sometimes. Like you’re on the outside watching it pass in front of you. Like you’re not the fragile center around which it constructs, structures, and dismantles itself. Like your life is a train and you’re on the platform watching it speed away. It is those moments that we cling to, that we try to recover in sleep. Because in sleep we don’t look upon things as they are, we are fundamentally unable to do so. Sleep is those fun mirrors we find in fairs, offering a distortion of ourselves back to us. And it is this image that we, like the protagonist of this book, covet....more
I sometimes get such terrible headaches that I find myself wishing that someone would volunteer to crush my skull with a rock and end my pain once andI sometimes get such terrible headaches that I find myself wishing that someone would volunteer to crush my skull with a rock and end my pain once and for all. Needlessly violent, I know. But the headaches are so oppressive that I absolutely can't function and something primal within me gets triggered.
I think we all have those moments when conditions that are internal or external to us cause our entire worldview to be flung outwards from an unstable centre, or we feel like our brains have turned into spinning tops. We lose solidity and are unsure of bodies. These hands, these breasts, these feet. Are they mine? Why do I see them floating about? No, I'm not high. I'm just detached from myself, my material existence seems to be a sham. If I close my eyes, will my hands just disappear altogether?
Fortunately for us, these moments are very brief and we snap out of them soon. Unfortunately for the characters in this book, it's all they ever feel. Uncertainty and hatred. So much hatred. Towards themselves and others. The thing about hatred is, it always is restless. It always finds an outlet.
I can see that the author was very inspired by Shirley Jackson (there are direct quotes) and that this book tries to offer the best of all horror worlds. But somehow, the haunted-house-is-a-living-breathing-character didn't work for me. Unlike with Jackson's haunted house, this one always seemed to have a clear agenda and victims. However, I really enjoyed the body-horror. But as far as horror is concerned, I don't know man, it just wasn't scary. Not in the conventional way at least. It was scary in the way fascism is scary. No jump scares, which is good. (Can a book even have jump scares?) But it was always trying to be in-your-face, over-the-top, scary. And that just made it not-scary. It was all just weird. Sometimes in a good way, but mostly in a confusion inducing way. ...more
Oh Foucault, you make me so fervently wary. Like delayed orgasms, I want to stop but I also want to go on, reach that peak and think 'crap, it could'vOh Foucault, you make me so fervently wary. Like delayed orgasms, I want to stop but I also want to go on, reach that peak and think 'crap, it could've been better. Oh well, next time.' My creative juices are drained right now, but I know this is the best time to talk about Foucault or talk to Foucault, had he been alive and accessible outside the celebrity pedestal that France placed its intellectuals on. You need, no, I need my mind to be sufficiently clouded if I am to benefit from my experience of reading these volumes on sexuality even though the books are very academic in nature and Foucault probably peered into ancient texts with the dexterity of a squirrel that accidentally ate a psychedelic mushroom and has been frantically looking for a special nut ever since. Like that squirrel from the ice age series, you know. I'm fairly certain it was perpetually high. Maybe all squirrels are. How are they so energetic all the time, everywhere?
This volume is just Foucault dissecting a lot of texts on sexual health and practices, love of women and love of boys (ahem, no women's love for girls unfortunately) written by dudes (probably why there is next to nothing on lesbianism, damn those ancient patriarchs) who ceased to exist long before Foucault himself came into this world and so are of little relevance to me now. It was also the most boring of the first three books, but I appreciate the number of hours Foucault must have spent on researching and writing this. He was nothing if not a chronic nerd....more
Maybe it's because I've lived most of my life in regions of tropical monsoon climate, but I love the cold, the snow, the blizzards, the ice structuresMaybe it's because I've lived most of my life in regions of tropical monsoon climate, but I love the cold, the snow, the blizzards, the ice structures, the frozen lakes, the endless white landscapes. In theory, I'm completely besotted with it.
But beneath all the iciness within this book is a barrage of emotions, unresolved tensions, and portent desire. It is in the deadlock of death that we confront the reverie of life, it is in the imaginary that we seek the real, as with Unn in this book, who senses her innocent malaise in a severe hypothermic state and under the gaze of large, monstrous eye that she can no longer tell herself is unreal.
On the other side is Siss, with her remorse, grief and the drive to 'undo.' Siss tries to impose order onto her grief by imitating the desired, perhaps she hopes to transform her very longing into a real entity, perhaps she wants to morph into the desired through pure remembrance and repetitions.
I read this book while on a beautiful train ride and the timing couldn't have been more perfect. It left me with a deep longing for the cold and surreal....more
On the back cover of the book is a comment (praise? I don't know) by Rega Jha:
"I hope every woman in India reads this book."
Of course nobody should haOn the back cover of the book is a comment (praise? I don't know) by Rega Jha:
"I hope every woman in India reads this book."
Of course nobody should have to say this to Rega Jha, a reputed journalist, but this comment is liberal bourgeoisie feminism extreme, so here I go - As per the 75th round of National Sample Survey, India's countrywide female literacy rate is 70.3%.
Thankfully, the author isn't trying to masquerade this book as ensconced in feminist concerns. The title does the book justice, it is about digital pornography and consent. She highlights how we still have no clear cut definition of pornography and the classification that we use today dates back to the 1800s.
In India, the selling and distribution of pornography is illegal and instead of laws protecting the interests and rights of individuals, we have obscenity clauses that are relics of colonialism, brahminism and India's gentry.
Padte elaborates on the problems with using the same laws to criminalize consensual pornography as well as non-consensual sexual content which simultaneously violate right to free sexual expression and women's rights in general. She also importantly writes about diversity within online sexual communities and how its anonymous character provides a platform for ostracized groups to discover and express their sexualities. In India where even talking about sex is taboo in most households, many of us had our first sexual awakening through the internet. But as the author rightly points out, this also is a matter of privilege. Not everyone has the access to privacy and digital zones of sexual expression.
But I wasn't very into the writing style, the conversational tone combined with the author's upper class background just appeared pretentious sometimes. The author ends the first chapter with this extremely off-putting line:
My copy of the book says "Ariadne, the brilliant feminist debut that everybody is talking about." Now bear with me here, but in my humble opinion, thiMy copy of the book says "Ariadne, the brilliant feminist debut that everybody is talking about." Now bear with me here, but in my humble opinion, this is neither brilliant nor feminist. Unless you consider resorting to the false dichotomy of "all men suck, women rock" feminist. I personally don't associate this idea with feminism, because although it focuses more on women, 21st century feminism has been collective, intersectional, abolitionist and most importantly, open to all. We are trying not to alienate anybody, we do not uphold age-old stereotypes that only further expand patriarchy. Sadly, it seems like some white feminists still think the struggle is "men vs women" and not "everyone versus patriarchy, capitalism, racism, bigotry, oppression."
Granted, a lot of Greek heroes and male greek Gods did suck, but I'd argue that most Greek Gods of all genders sucked, they were all sycophants. The book also seems to emulate some advanced version of the Madonna-whore complex. Women who claimed power for themselves and exercised it, like Medea and Hera, are portrayed as 'evil', while innocent, helpless women like Ariadne and Phaedra are portrayed as 'good.' I'm not trying to say that Hera is good, I'm just saying that she isn't any worse than Zeus with whom the word 'rape' is never once associated in this book. He is portrayed as a mostly neutral God who occasionally 'defiles' women. But Hera, who only makes a brief appearance in the end in a non-speaking role, is portrayed as pure evil.
There is also no actual character development, the men get worse and the women remain helpless, clueless. Ariadne starts as out as a woman who couldn't figure out her place in the world and ends that way too. I understand that the author didn't write fanfiction and therefore couldn't alter the myth itself, but she chose to end the story on a sad, sour note. I suppose this is actually a tragedy that portrays the horrible price Ariadne and Phaedra had to pay for actions they had no part in. And although this wasn't supposed to be fanfiction, the author twists the Hippolytus-Phaedra myth wherein she writes that Phaedra never actually accused Hippolytus of rape, but that an incomplete letter she wrote just before her death was found and misinterpreted. If Jennifer Saint could claim the agency to do this, I bet she could throw in some character development. This was such a disappointing and annoying read. It's a shame, because I actually absolutely love the myth of Ariadne....more
Forget The Sun Also Rises (which, in my humble opinion, is highly overrated anyway!) This needs to be the quintessential American fiction set in ParisForget The Sun Also Rises (which, in my humble opinion, is highly overrated anyway!) This needs to be the quintessential American fiction set in Paris. The delicate cadence of Baldwin's prose had me swooning.
Giovanni's Room examines the unbearable quality of freedom. The writing is so so visceral in its expressions of desire. Love here has a dual existence: it is liberating while also being burdened with regretful shame. And what is felt at a moment seems as random as the tossing of a coin - you have equal chances of encountering either face.
While discovering different modes of self-expression, the characters also struggle against the banality of life and more importantly, against gravity - that mutual force which inevitably drives them towards each other. Their struggle is ultimately against the heaviness of desire.
'What are you thinking? asked Giovanni. For a moment I was frightened and I was also ashamed. 'I was thinking,' I said, 'that I'd like to get out of Paris.'
Paris, with its superficial web of safety, provides the perfect backdrop for the unfolding of the story and the eventual doom. There is also an unexplainable exposition of loneliness - we all do it sometimes, yet it's one of the hardest things to understand. Why do the characters actively seek out loneliness when there are sources of affection right around them? Why do we?
It takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare....more
I think I read too much into the title and imagined that this book should be read only at night, and so for the past few weeks I read this just beforeI think I read too much into the title and imagined that this book should be read only at night, and so for the past few weeks I read this just before bed. While it's not exclusively for nighttime reading, it did provide some much needed relaxation. I first came across Mary Robison about a year ago and I absolutely loved her writing.
These are very ordinary stories about extremely ordinary people, but that is exactly what I have been looking for - snippets of the ordinary. After enduring this past year, I feel I like I've prematurely aged by atleast 10 years and each night as I go to bed, I feel a weariness settling deep into my bones. Although fiction is obviously a great source of escapism, the fiction I've been reading lately has only provided more despair. (And I'm beginning to think I'm a masochist - the unhealthy sort.)
In this book, Mary Robison explores the fertile space between fiction and reality and I was glad to be cocooned by its warmth and simplicity. However, the writing was rather dull when compared with Why Did I Ever - that book was excellent, please read it. More people should be reading it....more
This is going to sound weird, but this book was too optimistic for my tastes. Had I read it at a different time of my life, a time when I looked at thThis is going to sound weird, but this book was too optimistic for my tastes. Had I read it at a different time of my life, a time when I looked at the world around me with gleeful eyes, then maybe I would have liked it better.
To be fair, I really loved the protagonist. She's the type of female character I want to see represented more in the media. Her character possessed so much depth, and earlier in the book, a lot of potential too. But when I finished reading this, I had the same feeling of disappointment that often washes over me when I watch movies with 'strong' female characters that for half of the movie do not want to have any kids, but end up with a dozen of them anyway because they felt 'incomplete'.
Perhaps I'm being too harsh on this book. This isn't like Kafka on the Shore - now if you like that book, I'm going to instantly develop a 5% aversion towards you and I know I'm being judgy. No, I can see why people like this book. I just do not like books that read more like movie/tv series scripts and this was certainly one of them....more
I read an article a few months ago on Hierocles' idea of human relationships - he suggests that they are patterned on a series of concentric circles, I read an article a few months ago on Hierocles' idea of human relationships - he suggests that they are patterned on a series of concentric circles, like a succession of Russian nesting dolls and we occupy the innermost circle. Our challenge is to draw these circles closer together and I saw this marvelously unfolding in The Goldfinch, although sometimes, the innermost circle that Theo occupied shrunk hopelessly until he was but a dot, mourning, grieving and lonely. But the link between him and reality - the painting, The Goldfinch always drew him out, expanding his own worldview and giving him a taste of an immortal life.
When I looked at the painting I felt the same convergence on a single point: a flickering sun-struck instant that existed now and forever. Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch’s ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little living creature—fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place.
While the book beautifully deals with several themes - love, loss, addiction, art, immortality, grief, depression and life itself, what will stay with me for years to come is what I love the most in Virginia Woolf's novels - the scope of history, the simultaneous grandeur and decay of time, the sense of it passing irretrievably, the odd, cold feeling that sometimes washes over us on lonely nights, that we try so hard to thwart - we are but helpless spectators in our own lives.
Of course it’s a lot more than that too. Shock and aura. Things are stronger and brighter and I feel on the edge of something inexpressible. Coded messages in the in-flight magazines. Energy Shield. Uncompromising Care. Electricity, colors, radiance. Everything is a signpost pointing to something else. And, lying on my bed in some frigid biscuit-colored hotel room in Nice, with a balcony facing the Promenade des Anglais, I watch the clouds reflected on sliding panes and marvel how even my sadness can make me happy, how wall to wall carpet and fake Biedermeier furniture and a softly murmuring French announcer on Canal Plus can all somehow seem so necessary and right. I’d just as soon forget, but I can’t. It’s kind of the hum of a tuning fork. It’s just there. It’s here with me all the time.
When I was eighteen and dealing with a fresh bout of depression in my first year of college, the poem Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats was necessary reading material for my English literature paper.
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
These lines opened up new, shimmering vistas for my hazy, muddled mind. And yesterday, as I finished The Goldfinch, I returned to these same vistas, only to find them changed - they are now bigger and and more pellucid. Tartt's book is suffused with the idea that by participating in art, even if it is as a mere spectator, we become a part of its transcendental truth, beauty and immortality. And so we live on. ...more
How much of our identities are actually rooted firmly in the places we live in? And supposing it is a large, unignorable component, is it also inescapHow much of our identities are actually rooted firmly in the places we live in? And supposing it is a large, unignorable component, is it also inescapable? Or, as Gertrude Stein put it, "But what good are roots if you can't take them with you?" Lauren Elkin makes a case for discovering ourselves and the spaces we occupy through flâneusing, or wandering aimlessly - a leisure that historically women have been deprived of.
Flâneuse [flanne-euhze], noun, from the French. Feminine form of flâneur [flanne-euhr], an idler, a dawdling observer, usually found in cities.
As Elkin introspects philosophically into the subject, she attempts to trace the steps of a few famous women through various cities - Jean Rhys, Geroge Sand, Agnes Varda in Paris, Virginia Woolf in London and Sophie Calle in Venice. These women shared intimate relationships with the spaces they inhabited and conveyed it through their art.
I might even have given this book five stars if not for the Tokyo chapter. What bothered me is that Elkin didn't have anything pleasant to say about Tokyo - the only non-Western city included in the book. She does not examine the life of any woman who lived in Tokyo, she does not even walk around Tokyo much and she criticizes Barthes who praised Tokyo in his writings. She only has one thing to offer in the Tokyo chapter - the utter despair she experienced while living there. I don't even see the point of including Tokyo in the book - it clearly isn't written about like the rest of the cities and the chapter seems like a long, sad, hard-to-read diary entry. (She even included excerpts from her diary in this chapter and all of them can be reduced to "I am miserable here, Tokyo sucks.")
However, the writing overall is quite poignant.
A few days ago, a women's group in my hometown organized a march to protest the rising number of rape cases in India and the lack of efficiency in handling them. But, just as we convened at the scheduled time, permission was retracted by the city authorities - because it was after 7 pm. Though furious, we were also determined. They might have stopped us once, but they cannot stop us forever. We will march with purpose, but we will also flâneuse. With the indignation and the nonchalance that each of them require.
Claim the streets sisters, we shall prevail!
Space is not neutral. Space is a feminist issue. The space we occupy – here in the city, we city dwellers – is constantly remade and unmade, constructed and wondered at. ‘Space is a doubt,’ wrote Georges Perec; ‘I have constantly to mark it, to designate it. It’s never mine, never given to me, I have to conquer it.’ From Tehran to New York, from Melbourne to Mumbai, a woman still can’t walk in the city the way a man can....more
This is going to be one of those boring "I wanted to like this book, I was supposed to like this book, but..." reviews. The book begins well enough. HThis is going to be one of those boring "I wanted to like this book, I was supposed to like this book, but..." reviews. The book begins well enough. Hitz recounts her own experience in academia - how her fascination for learning and its pursuit as an activity of leisure warped into another ugly step to ascend over in the social order of academia.
It did not help that the academic world is famously, and truly, insular. Events and ideas from outside it enter through a narrow and peculiarly shaped gate, so that the experience of them always feels predigested. I longed for a broader experience, to gain my own traction over events in some way.
Sadly, this quickly turns into another book full of academic jargon (the very thing Hitz shuns) and reeks of elitism. She even goes so far as to question if the solitary nature of poverty, imprisonment and oppression give way to some sort of maximization of our intellectual capabilities and cites the examples of some key figures who flourished intellectually under debilitating circumstances. Listen, by this sort of reductionist argument you might just stumble upon a twisted justification for suppression and exploitation of the human populace, and then you have to question if human dignity is a price you are willing to pay for intellectual development. I, for one, am not.
She does later condone poverty and suffering and makes a case for intellectual pursuit being a form of escapism. So believe me when I say that this book is self-contradictory in many places.
While she does make a very good case for intellectual pursuits simply for the pleasure of learning (which is of course a noble endeavor that needs to be normalized and brought back from the time of antiquity into the modern world), she also constantly undermines the need for application of our accumulated knowledge into practical human endeavors. I simply fail to understand how they can be kept entirely separate.
Political talk builds an exterior wall of words, a set of opinions built and reinforced by competitive passions: “I am this sort of person and not that.” It is a way to avoid the encounter with the difficult and humiliating social reality to which one belongs or for which one is responsible. Further on, I call this process “opinionization,” by which I mean the reduction of thinking and perception to simple slogans or prefabricated positions, a reduction motivated by fear, competition, and laziness.
I do understand that labels often place limits on our perception of the world, but definitions simply offer us an orientation in which to pursue higher goals, in which to construct our moral compass. Definitions keep us from losing ourselves in the hegemonic chaos of this world. After all ideas like justice, liberty, truth and freedom cannot be plainly theoretical concepts, their actual value lies in their application in the world of human affairs where they were originally conceived. Without these definitions, we just encounter an impasse when trying to differentiate right from wrong.
In her last chapter she makes a case for educational institutions (particularly universities) being kept entirely separate from political ideologies. I don't know about the West, but we have accomplished a lot and are still fighting to gain some progressive grounds through the mighty fire of student protests in the East. When democracy is simply bestowed upon you, perhaps you can afford to take it for granted. That is not the case in many countries.
One of the things about this book that irked me is a wider problem that I frequently encounter in the books of the 21st century Western philosophers, that of writing which could easily be interpreted as written for a world completely erased of the East. In the numerous examples from history and literature she cites, only a single eastern figure (an Assyrian emperor) makes a fleeting appearance, despite the existence of several records across various Eastern cultures of immersion in learning for its own sake.
I am just going to quote from The Book of Tea to express my general frustration:
When will the West understand, or try to understand, the East? We Asiatics are often appalled by the curious web of facts and fancies which has been woven concerning us. We are pictured as living on the perfume of the lotus, if not on mice and cockroaches. It is either impotent fanaticism or else abject voluptuousness. Indian spirituality has been derided as ignorance, Chinese sobriety as stupidity, Japanese patriotism as the result of fatalism. It has been said that we are less sensible to pain and wounds on account of the callousness of our nervous organisation! Why not amuse yourselves at our expense? Asia returns the compliment....more
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